Tyche Shepherd

An Oxford University team have successfully created false associative memories in fruit flies which can be triggered by laser . There are 12 neurons in a fruit fly's brain which are responsible for associative memory. The team injected ATP, sealed in a light sensitive chemical cage which would activate these neurons when stimulated with a laser .

The experiment used an odour as an external trigger and were able to show that flies who had the artificial memories stimulated behaved exactly as flies who had learned to associate the odour with a bad experience , i.e. they avoided the odour even though they had not been exposed to it before. Flies in the control group showed no avoidance behaviour.


A lot more here
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Bad memories written with lasers

The paper was published in The Cell which also carries another paper by a different team in the US and Scotland ,who did similar neuronal work controlling appetite in flies.

Cell - A Neural Circuit Mechanism Integrating Motivational State with Memory Expression in Drosophila

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